


somewhere outside my life babe

by arekiras



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Other, Panic Attacks, Past Child Abuse, Past Drug Addiction, Post Season 2, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Triggers, none of these warnings are for super graphic content but i'm just covering my bases
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 00:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18083507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arekiras/pseuds/arekiras
Summary: He feels like he’s picked a scab and the wound is bleeding again. He had left it to crust over for so long, had resisted scratching the incessant little itch. But now it’s all bubbling back up to the surface. Benzaiten. Jack. Sarah.The curse of Andromeda come back to haunt him, thirty-five years later.Mind the trigger warnings in the tags, this fic contains non-graphic mentions of past abuse and trauma, exploring how Juno may deal with the long term effects of the events in Monster's Reflection and possibly begin to cope with them in more healthy ways. I tried to keep it gentle, but Juno does have flashbacks, panic attacks, and dissociates. He doesn't come to any harm and is kept safe the entire time, and none of the mentions or descriptions of past abuse/what triggers him are very prolonged. But please be mindful and take care.





	somewhere outside my life babe

Juno has always been a glass on the verge of spilling over. Every time someone jostles him, a little bit sloshes over the edge, a little bit of himself pours out before he can stop it. And he can’t put it back in. 

Every day could be a day where he spills his guts all over the floor, and all there will be left to do is sit in the mess. Impossible to clean up. Impossible to pack away neatly again. 

It’s been harder, harder than it has been in almost twenty years. Since the dreams he had when the Theia was removed, he can’t seem to keep a hold of it all. His ghosts are everywhere again. Constantly spilling over, out of his dreams and into his waking moments, pouring and pouring out of his empty eye socket. Filling up every room he walks into. 

He feels like he’s picked a scab and the wound is bleeding again. He had left it to crust over for so long, had resisted scratching the incessant little itch. But now it’s all bubbling back up to the surface. Benzaiten. Jack. Sarah. 

The curse of Andromeda come back to haunt him, thirty-five years later. 

Rita has been around longest, has witnessed enough of Juno’s drunken hysterical rages for him to feel ashamed, but it also means she notices first and most often. “Mistah Steel?” she says softly, teetering on the edge of the kitchen threshold. Juno stands there in the harsh yellow lighting of the ship in his socks and underwear, surrounded by the broken remains of a bowl from the drying rack and a plastic cup that has splashed its water into a pool around his feet. He’s covering his ears with his hands, eye shut tight. 

He just wanted a fucking drink. 

But then the metal walls of the ship creaked a bit, settling or something, and he remembered how there was a creaky floor tile in his house in Old Town and how even in her drugged and drunken haze Sarah Steel had the ears of a bat and she would hear him moving around at night, corner him, captive audience to her most recent stage show of misery. He knocked the glass bowl off the countertop. 

The sound of it shattering into a pieces sent his heart rattling and suddenly he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t see straight and he felt half out of space and time. On the ship, in his kitchen in Old Town. Forty years old, fifteen years old. He shattered a little bit too. 

He doesn’t know how long he stood there, but then Rita was before him. Shuffling slightly, voice uncharacteristically low. 

“Mistah Steel, can you hear me?” she asks. 

Juno doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to speak again. He grunts out a noise of affirmation, the sound warbled to his own covered ears. His eye is still shut. 

More hesitant shuffling. Closer. He can feel her drawing closer and if he could move he would step away. Probably directly onto a piece of glass, but it would be better than hands on him. Anywhere near him. 

She doesn’t touch him. He hears the distinct sound of glass scraping against tile, feels movement around his feet. Rita, using a towel to clear up the broken bowl and water from around him. 

“You should go back to bed, Mistah Steel,” Rita suggests. 

Juno blinks open his eye at her. The light is too bright, and for a minute he swears he sees another woman, taller, angrier, but he doesn’t. It’s just Rita. The nearness of her still almost makes his knees buckle and his stomach heave, but it’s just Rita. Rita stepping aside, Rita turning on the sink, and. Oh. 

Rita holding out a new cup of water to him. Hand high on the rim of the glass, so he can take it without touching her fingers. His hand shakes terribly, but he takes it. Mechanically, as if there’s no other option. 

“Night night, Mistah Steel,” she says, turning away from him and rummaging for her god awful salmon snacks. 

Juno peels his soaked socks from the floor. One foot at a time. Stiffly. Unsteadily. Feeling a bit like a corpse. He goes back to bed. 

 

Juno almost laughed out loud when Buddy and Jet presented their newest job to the rest of the crew, it was so perfect. Too perfect. Something out of one of Rita’s streams. A heist under the cover of a masquerade ball, held by one of Hyperion City’s most elite families. 

It’s the first time Juno has set foot back on Mars, since he and Rita fled to the sky. He isn’t technically on Martian ground, but rather floating high above it in the well watered paradisal garden of an Uptown estate. Wearing a mask. Buddy insists it’s a ram, but Juno hasn’t ever seen a ram like this. It covers the upper half of his face, molded almost perfectly to his features and a rich matte black with twisting, shining black horns poking out of the top of it. The gold septum piercing in his nose had been his idea. 

However, the novelty of it isn’t quite enough to make Juno feel at ease. He’s already down an eye, and his blindspot has now grown to include all but a tiny hole around his good eye that he can see through. Every time someone moves past him he has to resist the urge to jerk his head around and look. 

He needs a drink.

Or something stronger. 

There are waiters in golden tuxedos carrying small gilded trays of pills wrapped in individual multi colored papers, artfully arranged around small glasses of drink to swallow them down with. The partygoers slip them under their masks at leisure, taking small sips and smiling as the little pills slide down. 

When Juno used to take pills, they usually came in tiny plastic baggies hidden underneath his dealer’s tongue. 

He’s sure these are more expensive, but from Old Town to Uptown, illicit drugs don’t differ that much. Even twenty years out and several feet away, Juno can feel the bitter aftertaste on the back of his tongue. 

It would certainly improve his mood. If he takes two, he would cease having a mood at all. 

“Juno?” Nureyev comes up behind him almost silently, which really shouldn’t be possible, considering that he is wearing both high heeled boots and a stiff necked cape (for the silhouette). Juno can’t see it, but Nureyev’s muffled voice tells him that the orange and white fox mask is still in place on Nureyev’s face. “We’re almost done here.” His hand lands on the small of Juno’s back. “You’re tense.” 

Juno smiles tightly. “I’ll be fine.” He through his little peephole as a woman in a silvery suit and feathered mask knocks back two of the little pills with a drink of champagne. His eye follows the movement of her swallow, bubbles chasing chemicals into her stomach and bloodstream. He can’t see it, but he knows her pupils will dilate, her heart will flutter up out of her chest like a bird. 

He used to chase that feeling, those first euphoric minutes, into the bottom of every pill bottle to be found in Old Town. 

His covered forehead breaks out into a small, prickling sweat. 

“When can we get out of here?” Juno asks, and Nureyev hums, shifting to be in Juno’s line of sight. 

Nureyev certainly sees Buddy before Juno does, dressed in one of those golden tuxedos like the rest of the waiters. Juno does, however, see the look that travels between them, though he hasn’t quite deciphered it when Peter turns back to him and says, “Whenever you like. Somewhere else you want to be?” He smiles sharply under his mask. 

Juno is tempted to smile back, but says only, “Away from here. If you don’t mind.” 

 

It’s just a graze. A blast of laser fire just a hair faster than Nureyev’s reflexes, slicing through the flesh of his bicep. Lots of blood, little injury. Juno knows it as he sees it, watches Nureyev’s face pinch into a tight grimace of pain. 

_ Benzaiten! _

The shots end relatively quickly after that, Buddy’s one-eyed aim worlds better than Juno’s. Nureyev doesn’t even shake as he gets back up off the ground, leaving droplets of red in his wake. 

_ Benzaiten Steel, open this door! _

Juno’s throat is clogged, he can’t breathe. He feels cracked open, a dropped egg with the runny yolk oozing out. “Juno?” Nureyev asks, brow furrowed. 

_ BENTEN! _

The hand Nureyev had been using to press tight around the wound in his arm comes up toward Juno, worry creasing his face. Juno lurches back, body springing into action so fast his mind can’t track it. Jumping, a series of flinches until he finds himself back in their hotel room. 

Another jump out of his skin and he’s leaning his entire body against the hotel room door. Forehead against the cool wood. He knows that if he looks down to the floor he will see blood pooling, dark dark red and soaking into his pants at the knees.

He looks. 

Green carpet. Clean. Freshly vacuumed. 

“Juno,” Nureyev says again, possibly having repeated it many times before Juno actually heard him. Juno shifts on his knees, turning around to face the inside of the room. Nureyev sits on the bed, out of his bloody shirt. His arms are exposed, a clean white bandage wrapped around his wounded bicep. A little dot of red visible beneath where it’s still bleeding slightly. 

He meets Nureyev’s eyes briefly before settling his face on the center of his chest. He’s listening. 

“Where did you go?” Nureyev asks and Juno wants to laugh hollowly, but he can’t find that within him. 

He’s exhausted, suddenly. Aching. 

One more look at the floor to make sure there’s no blood, no slumped body on the other side of the door, and he sinks down from his knees to sit flat on his ass, resting his face in the cradle of his arms. 

 

It’s much later that same night, or possibly very early the next morning, by the time Juno answers. They’ve managed to arrange themselves in the bed, Juno cocooned in the hotel bedding with Nureyev a safe distance away, their fingers just barely touching across the chasm between them. 

“Sorry,” Juno mumbles, and Nureyev looks down. 

“Whatever for?” he asks. 

“You’re the one that’s hurt and I freaked out like that. It was…” Juno doesn’t know what it was. Stupid? Maybe. Embarrassing? Certainly. Nureyev won’t accept either of those. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Nureyev says gently. This time, Juno does manage that hollow laugh. Only, rather disgustingly, it turns into half of a sob. He presses his hand to his mouth, but it’s too late. More horrible sobs come out. 

“It was. That’s the thing. It was my fault,” Juno says finally. Nureyev doesn’t answer, just watches him. Waiting. Giving him the choice to elaborate, or not. 

Juno thinks that he shouldn’t continue. It was enough forcing himself to remember. But then… could it get any worse? 

“My, uh. My brother, Benzaiten. We were twins. And you know my mom killed him. She wasn’t really. She wasn’t well; she was honestly really, really sick. She thought he was me, and she killed him. And his blood. I could smell it for weeks,” Juno runs a hand over his face. “Anyway. When Jet removed the Spectrum from my head, I dreamed it. Sort of. It was like I was living it all over again, a lot of terrible shit that I worked really hard to forget. And so lately it’s been at the forefront of my mind, every moment, waiting for something to happen. When you got shot, I just went back there.” 

Juno runs out of steam, his mouth working for a few more seconds before closing. He looks up at Nureyev again and sees nothing but an intent expression, mostly devoid of emotion. Unlike Juno, Nureyev doesn’t wear every single feeling he has on his face. Normally it’s frustrating, but now Juno is almost glad he can’t decipher what’s going on in Nureyev’s head. If he saw guilt, or worse,  _ pity _ , he doesn’t know what he would do. 

Eventually, Nureyev says, “I understand. I’m sorry, Juno. But it’s not your fault that any of that happened. You don’t have to believe me, and we don’t need to talk about it, I know you’re tired. I just need you to know that you don’t have anything to apologize for.” 

Juno wants to argue, but he  _ is _ tired. “Can we sleep, now?” 

Nureyev’s mouth pulls up in a half smile. “That depends. Can I have some of those blankets, or do I have to stay out here and freeze?” 

Juno begrudgingly unravels himself enough for Nureyev to join him in his safe little cave of hotel covers, tensing when Nureyev first wraps him up in warm arms, but then relaxing into the embrace. Touch hasn’t historically made him feel safe, but this touch, from this person, does. He’s still trying to get used to it. 

“Thank you for trusting me with that,” Nureyev whispers, and Juno shrugs with one shoulder. 

“Might as well know what you’re getting into.” 

“Oh, Juno,” Nureyev gives a little laugh, “I’ve always known what I was getting into, with you.” 

  
  



End file.
